


One Bullet Left

by Zoadgo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 03:05:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3365369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Murphy grips the barrel of the gun between his teeth. He has to get this right, has to blow his brain stem out with the one remaining bullet, otherwise he’s fucked. He wasn’t even bitten, but he doesn’t want to risk the disease, or parasite, or whatever it is finding him after he’s drawn his last breath and forcing him to get up again. He doesn’t want to have to put his little group through that, not when he’s always been the one to take the burden of killing those who were bitten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Bullet Left

Murphy grips the barrel of the gun between his teeth. He has to get this right, has to blow his brain stem out with the one remaining bullet, otherwise he’s fucked. He wasn’t even bitten, but he doesn’t want to risk the disease, or parasite, or whatever it is finding him after he’s drawn his last breath and forcing him to get up again. He doesn’t want to have to put his little group through that, not when he’s always been the one to take the burden of killing those who were bitten.

The metal is cold against his lips and makes light noises as his teeth chatter against it. He’s so goddamn cold, doesn’t have enough blood left in him to carrying heat through his limbs. The pool of blood beneath him isn’t spreading quite so fast anymore, and the weapon in his hand feels unbearably heavy. So heavy that his arm falls, fingers limply releasing the trigger. The gun itself clatters to the ground a second later when his jaw relaxes and hair and his teeth give up their grip.

Fuck, he’s going to die in the middle of nowhere, and no one will even know what happened. Murphy tries to keep his eyes open even as his body slumps down further. He reads faded signs, pick up on every tiny detail in the abandoned parking lot that he can. He notes the hole in the window where the bullets, most of them currently lodged in the wall behind him after having passed through him, came through. He bites his tongue as his vision begins to fade and he tastes copper, but that might be from the blood that seems to be covering every inch of him. And just as Murphy is about to settle down, give up, and go to sleep, he gets slapped in the face.

“You dumbass!” The owner of the hand that hit him curses at him, and he recognizes that voice. Murphy manages to draw up some small amount of strength and opens his eyes, seeing Clarke glaring at him as she removes his jacket, blonde hair as impossibly clean as ever. He should have expected her, really, Clarke was always saving him.

“Hey there, angel. So desperate to get me undressed?” He laughs a little at the end and chokes on his own blood. Not a good sign, but neither are the holes in his flesh, so he laughs anyway.

“I’ve told you not to call me that, Murphy, it’s a stupid nickname. And shut up, I need to save your life here and that’s going to require some concentration.” Clarke’s forehead wrinkles the way it always does whenever she’s concentrating, her gaze focused on his wounds. Murphy smiles at her, not that she sees it.

“Angel’s a perfect nickname for you, ‘cause you’re always doing this. Saving people. Even dumbasses like me.” Murphy hisses in a breath as her fingers touch around the wound, examining without much care being given to gentleness.

“If you didn’t put yourself at risk so much in the first place,” Clarke pulls her bag open and grabs the medical supplies she always carries, “I wouldn’t have to keep saving your ass.”

“Just wanted to get us some food.” It’s true. He never would have gone into the ganglands, the one area that’s safe from zombies but much more dangerous than anywhere that the infected roam, except for the fact that his little group was starving, and he was the best thief out of them. He’d done it a hundred times before, slipping past patrols and various groups of violent humans in order to get the supplies they needed, but this time he hadn’t managed the getaway quite so well. 

Clarke’s hands still on his side for a moment, before she shakes her head and pours something over his wounds that makes Murphy clench his teeth together so hard he fears he might break them. She sets to work doing whatever it is that Clarke does to save people, involving a lot of very clean pieces of fabric and painful touches to his wounds that she doesn’t apologize for. She still looks angry with him, and Murphy is glad. If she had forgiven him that easily, she wouldn’t be the Clarke that he knows.

She replaces his jacket after she finishes bandaging him, and Murphy doesn’t feel quite like dying anymore. He doesn’t feel any better, though, and so he just continues to lay there. Clarke stows her gear once again, swinging her pack onto her shoulder as she rises in one fluid motion. She reaches over Murphy to pick up his bag which clinks gently when she raises it, indicating the bounty of tin cans within. None of them have labels, but whatever, the group can eat surprise meals for a bit.

“Get up.” Clarke commands him, as if Murphy has ever obeyed her. He just snorts and doesn’t move.

“Nah, I’m good here.” Okay, maybe he lied about not feeling like dying. Dying sounds pretty good right now, or at least not standing up. The slightest attempt to flex any of the muscles required to carry out the motion exhausts him.

“Murphy, you’re a fucking idiot. You went into Grounder gang territory,got yourself shot, and you’re too damn heavy for me to carry, but you’re part of our group and I’m not leaving you behind. So get the hell up, now.”

Murphy groans heavily, but he manages to bend his legs at the knee. He holds a hand up and feels Clarke’s grip strong on his wrist in a heartbeat, and then she’s helping him up. Every muscle in his body is crying out, begging for him to stop, but hey, Murphy’s always been a bit of a masochist. He’s panting by the time his feet are fully under him, and gravity seems to be extremely inconsistent, alternately attempting to pull him back down and fling him into space. But Murphy is standing, and even halfway stable as long as he keeps his arm where Clarke placed it around her shoulders, so he considers it a win.

“I didn’t know you care so much, angel.” Clarke’s arm slides around Murphy’s chest and he tries to bear more of his own weight so that her hand stops digging quite so painfully into his ribs.

“If you’re alive enough for sarcasm, you’re alive enough to walk. Come on.” All business, as usual. There’s a reason Clarke had become their de facto leader, and the only person on the planet Murphy will listen to.

Their pace is horribly slow, and Murphy worries about Grounders or some other gang coming across them. But the sun is setting, and that’s when they all light their fires and cling to them, fearing the infected even when sitting amongst reserves of weaponry that military forces would be jealous of. The pavement beneath their feet, which Murphy fixes his gaze on, becomes more and more cracked as they leave the heart of the city, and nature begins to overtake it. Manmade paths turns to fields of grass that would be beautiful, if you didn’t know why they were so green.

It was a quirk of the apocalypse, actually. No one was tending nature anymore, but she lived on just as strong as always. Sure, some fields and forests were slightly sickly, but there were many more that were fertilized by the best source they could get. Those places always had their own sound when you walked across them, a subtle crackling punctuated by the occasional snap. The bones of those who fell during the initial outbreak are all that remains to remember them, there wouldn’t be enough space on the planet for all the graves. Death was just another part of life these days, no one worried about walking across corpses.

“Why didn't you leave me behind, Clarke?” Not that Murphy wanted to die, but really, they had a rule. Zero tolerance for the infected or those who couldn’t cut it, as marked by the ‘0’ branded on their hands. It wasn’t worth their lives to save one person, the only reason to take a risk would be to save everyone.

“You’re useful.” 

Murphy shakes his head and glances at her out of the corner of his eye, noting the way her lips are slightly parted as she huffs light breaths, the only sign of the strain of carrying two packs and another person on her.

“That’s not enough, we’ve left useful people behind before. We left Octavia with the Grounders when they took her, and she was our best warrior. I’m just a thief and an executioner.” It’s true. Everyone had liked Octavia far more than him, and Bellamy had raged for days about them leaving her. But it wasn’t worth it to try and free her, and if Murphy was right in his identification of the face he saw in the window, it wouldn’t have been “freeing” her, anyway.

“You’re also a royal pain in my ass, don’t forget that.” Murphy smiles, and Clarke even looks slightly less angry. He can’t remember the last time he saw her actually smile. She seems just about to say something, when a far too familiar sound comes out of the woods in front of them. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Clarke mutters under her breath, dragging Murphy to the nearest tree and leaning him against it. He doesn’t complain, just bites back a groan as he has to shift to grab the trunk and keep himself up. He knows that sound, the whispering moan backed by a growl that can only come from a throat that was once human, but no longer remembers how to even form the word.

Clarke shifts into an entirely different form of anger as she drops the packs at Murphy’s feet and takes out her long knives, one in each hand. With Murphy she was all fire, quick bursts of anger that were ultimately harmless. But this version of her is cold, focused and implacable in her violence. Murphy can’t help but be enthralled as Clarke crouches slightly, bringing her body closer to the ground and waiting for the first zombie to come into range.

When the walking corpse passes the tree to her left, Clarke barely shows any sign that she’s even seen it before she moves, darting behind it and slicing through the back of its neck. The muscles in her arms stand prominent in the action, the only indication of the frightening amount of force required to sever a spine. Before the zombie has fallen to the ground, a true corpse once again, she’s onto the next target.

Murphy gets lost in watching her fight. It’s these moments that he’s completely certain in his feelings for her. When he watches her move, ruthless and brutal in every step, he knows he loves her. Outside of a fight it becomes more complex, clouded with the harsh reality of life, but something about proximity to death had always clarified things for Murphy. Clarke drops three infected in less than a minute, and Murphy’s never been more confident in anything in his entire life.

Then her gaze, always calculating but never so much as when she’s in a battle, slides over to him and horror crosses her face, breaking the smooth mask of vengeance that she wears when facing the infected. He hears the shouted warning from her lips in the same second that he feels a putrid breath slide over his cheek.

Murphy drops to the ground. It’s the easiest thing to do, and brings him out of range for a heartbeat as the zombie’s teeth clash together on empty air, a chip flying off of them to land on Murphy’s cheek. He grimaces and moves as quickly as he can, gun that he’d been planning to end his life with not so long ago once again gripped in his hand, this time in hopes of saving his life. He only has one bullet left, and one chance to hit the very small target that will actually kill the zombie.

Murphy inhales calmly, gun steady in his hands and aim as true as ever.

He exhales as his finger squeezes the trigger gently, launching a small package of true death towards the beast above him.

He embraces death as he sees the bullet hit the creature in the forehead, too high by several inches to save his life.

The zombie falls on him, but not in the manner which Murphy had been expecting. It lands on his chest with a heavy thud, making his bullet wounds dig angry claws into his flesh and driving any vestige of air from his lungs, but it doesn’t do anything. When Murphy can again see, through the tears of pain in his eyes, he sees Clarke pulling the corpse off of him, one of her knives embedded in its skull. He grins up at her and she glares down at him.

“See?” He wheezes, “Angel.”

“You want to know why I didn’t leave you behind, Murphy?” Clarke crosses her arms, and Murphy guesses the infected that attacked him must have been the last of that pack, because she seems to be gearing up for a lecture. “I didn’t leave you because you do stuff no one else is willing to do. You enforce my rules, you steal for us, and you kill any of us who become exposed. But you’re also a fucking idiot.”

Murphy struggles to haul himself upright again, using the tree to clamber to his feet. He decides he loves that tree, it’s so solid. And it isn’t yelling at him right now.

“You risk your life every time you ignore my orders, which you do constantly. You waste ammunition by trying to take shots you can’t make, you anger everyone around you because you can’t just play nice with anyone. You refuse to help certain people just because you don’t like them, and you manage to make the entire group slightly more unstable just by being there. Really, I should have left you behind, you cause more trouble than you’re worth.” By this point, Clarke has advanced on him to the point that Murphy wouldn’t even have to move much to touch her, and Murphy has regained his breath. He leans his head back against the lovely tree and smirks.

“So, I ask you again, why didn’t you leave me?” The adrenaline, and the blood finally making an appearance in his circulatory system after its earlier depletion, makes Murphy feel halfway alive. Clarke narrows her eyes at him even more, as if he were challenging her. 

“I thought it would be obvious.” She huffs out a breath and turns away from him, not increasing the distance between them, but effectively avoiding looking at him. He can see her shoulders slump in defeat, and he has a feeling that what he’s about to hear is going to be the real reason, something more genuine than his use. “You’ve been in this with me since the start, Murphy. We almost killed each other in that first week, but we didn’t. No one else from our original group is left. You’re all I have left of what we were before this, the only person who remembers who I was before I killed my first person. I can’t ever leave you behind, because if I do, I leave that girl behind too. I leave behind the angel.”

Murphy is perfectly still. There’s no sarcasm he can spout in response to that, no snarky reply to lighten the mood. That was the sort of truth that you can’t touch, can’t even acknowledge properly because it’s just too pure and it will destroy you if you try. So he just reaches out, slowly, gently, his hand touching Clarke’s bare elbow and guiding her to turn back towards him. She won’t meet his gaze, and he knows why. They’ve never been close, not like that, not the way that lets you be truthful with one another. But now that it’s out there, at least Clarke’s side of it, there’s no going back to whatever they were before. And Murphy needs to tell her that’s okay, but he doesn’t know how. Words fail him in that moment, but hell, he’s always been more of one for impulsive actions anyway.

The hand on her elbow moves up to her chin, raising it so Clarke has to look at him. Murphy meets her gaze for a moment, hoping to convey everything he feels for her in that look. The respect, the care, the love, even the burning resentment that she makes him feel like this. And then he leans forward slightly, pressing his lips gently to hers, his action just as permanent and unretractable as her words.

His heart beats twice before Clarke responds, stepping forward and pushing him slightly into the tree, just enough that she can take some of his weight. His hand drops to her shoulder, and he feels her hands wrap around the back of his neck, fingers threading through his hair. Their lips move slowly, no passion to the kiss, just a deep understanding for one another. It’s tender and calm, unlike any other aspect of their life, and it’s exactly what Murphy never realized he needed until now. There would be time for passion later, but in this moment, they’re simply supporting each other, for no other reason than the fact that they’re the only mementos of the other’s life before the world went to hell.

And maybe, when they break apart, Clarke shoulders the packs and they begin on their slow journey back to camp again, hell doesn’t seem quite so bad.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I got a prompt for Clarphy zombie apocalypse AU from [leonathelioness](http://leonathelioness.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, and this is what happened! [coldsaturn](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) is the best for editing this so quickly and helping with my paranoia last night, so yes. I don't know what else to say right now cause I didn't sleep last night, but I hope you guys enjoyed this!
> 
> Come chat with me [on tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) Thanks in advance for commenting/viewing/leaving kudos <3


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